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Evangelism question time #1

First, thank you for all your comments, feedback and questions. I’ve really enjoyed hearing from old industry colleagues and new friends in DevRel roles around the world. Thought I’d share some questions we’ve discussed that I think are of general interest in a round up post.

We don’t have the resources to build an Evangelism team like BlackBerry’s, can I hire a Community Manager to run my developer program?

Well, maybe. Developers can spot other developers in a heartbeat, they can also spot someone that’s not a developer just as quickly. If your community manager is a developer and has participation from your Product Development Team, this may work but I’m assuming that you’ve built out an SDK, developer portal, blog, forums (yours or Stackoverflow and their ilk), Twitter and Facebook presence as prerequisites. Your team needs to build a thoughtful and targeted key influencer program to help you scale out your message. Evangelism is active and participatory, so, you should build a company wide understanding of your engagement model because everyone is an evangelist.

What about breadth vs. depth programs?

The funny thing about this, I get a lot of pings from former ‘Softies on this one. This question is a classic “can I have my cake and eat it too?” resource investment problem. Simple answer, I didn’t find the silver bullet at BlackBerry, we bit the bullet and did both to the best of our abilities and resources. Mind you, BlackBerry took ecosystem building seriously and invested on the order of a 10X increase in investment over anything RIM had done before but still pales in comparison to investment levels at my former employer.

Should we charge for our Developer Program?

We decided that information and SDKs should be free, however “App Certification” is paid (our Built for BlackBerry program). I believe the time to “Hello World” is critical, once you’ve captured a developer’s attention, so for BlackBerry we’ve focused on speeding and simplifying our programs as much as possible and still have more work to do here.

Come on, your other posts about what tactics and strategies you used are the same as everyone else, where’s the secret sauce?

Well, really there is no secret sauce, perhaps a quick summary will help. Your single most critical success factor are the people on your team, they have to all be great hires. All my Evangelists must be interviewed by me and Alec and have the key skills, background and “intangibles” we’ve seen in our high powered Evangelists. Next is consistency, both in your approach on engagement, but your product design must manifest what you’re evangelizing to the community in terms of value prop and experience. Does your firm believe your ecosystem is strategically key to it’s success? Believe me this commitment, or lack thereof shows through to developers and won’t invest if they feel you’re making a temporary investment. Be approachable, the “anonymous evangelist on a forum” persona is a recipe for failure, people respond to people. Yes, we’re in the technology business but Evangelism is a People business, it really is about hearts and minds. Have fun, take risks and be memorable.

What do you think of what “fill in competitor name here” is doing with their Evangelism program?

Most often I get asked about my former employer, and the honest answer is I don’t know and you’ll have to do the research and form your own opinion. If you’re asking me to benchmark what we do vs. others, something I learned at my former employer and my read of the Steve Jobs biography is that Apple also observes, adopts and “owns” strategies and tactics we all see in play developed by others in the industry. You should too.

Great stuff, especially regarding the prerequisites of an effective program and devs relating to other devs better than sales/marketing people. I’m surprised not to see more about the role of hackathons and online app competitions though. Readers interested in dev relations best practices may be interested in these five guides ChallengePost just released based on our experience growing developer communities: http://challengepost.com/organizations/app_contest_resources. I’d also welcome any feedback on them.

Thanks Brian, good point. We view hackathons as an early in cycle awareness tool and did use them last year. One quick observation, our hackathons showed a higher affinity with the younger developer demographic and will be changing our approach with them because of that.

Also, took a peek at the “Getting Started” guides on your site, good stuff! Yep, I think we had a mind meld going when we wrote these.